Monday, July 31, 2006

Last night I watched the Google Video version of the documentary “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West”. It’s a fascinating film, and I recommend it. It lasts more than an hour, so pop some popcorn and settle in to watch the whole thing. Warning: there are occasional graphic video sequences, including footage of the desecration of American corpses in Mogadishu and Fallujah, so viewer discretion is advised.

If you are a regular reader of Gates of Vienna, you won’t learn anything really new from this video. But all the compelling themes are there, drawn together in one neat package. It’s like a “Best of Jihad Watch“ in video format, with graphic accounts of Radical Islam in various trouble spots across the world. There are interviews with familiar faces, including Daniel Pipes and Sir Martin Gilbert.

One of the prominent themes the movie focuses on is the depraved indoctrination of children into the Palestinian death cult. There were numerous clips taken from Palestinian television in which small children — one is three years old — talk excitedly about killing the Jews and becoming martyrs for Allah. In one such example, the little girl shown at right is shouting about martyrdom in what looks like a classroom, under the encouragement of a teacher.

When the camera pulls back from her at the end of her recitation, you can see the grotesquely incongruous cartoon figures of Minnie Mouse and Daisy Duck, among others, on a wall in the background.

I don’t know about you, but that really gives me the creeps — to take the familiar icons of the nurseries of the West and use them as a backdrop for the indoctrination of children into the Islamic suicide-murder cult: Can you think of anything fouler than that?

I assume that Porky and Curious George and the other apes and pigs of the cartoon world were not included in the little jihadists’ school pantheon. But it made me wonder who else may be on that wall…

How about this one?

Rise and shine, kiddies!Sing along with me:

Let’s get up and make the bed,Get dressed and tie our shoes!Eat our groats and brush our teethAnd then go kill the Jews!

Sometimes, when I’m confronted with a reality this horrific, the only way I can deal with it is through humor.

There are not enough millstones on the planet to hang round the necks of these people and cast them into the sea. Of all the abominations in the world, none is worse than the deliberate destruction of children. And, in case of the Palestinians’ idea of education, the destruction of childhood itself.

We’ve grown uncomfortable with moral language. Even if one is religious — which I am — it’s difficult to talk straightforwardly about atrocity. If these people are not evil, then the word “evil” has no meaning. The destruction of children goes beyond mere badness and sociopathy and enters a zone which can only be described with the vocabulary of theology.

I’ve written before about the current confluence of events as a “Demonic Convergence”, and if anything is demonic, “Palestine” surely is. An entire culture, possessed by demons.

Robert Godwin (a.k.a. Gagdad Bob, at One Cosmos) has written frequently about what he calls “mind parasites”. These are self-replicating mental structures passed on from generation to generation by disturbed people to their disturbed children. They are destructive memes, malware of varying virulence that infects the minds of its human hosts and does incalculable damage.

The public culture of the Palestinians is infected collectively with malevolent mind parasites. The infection started decades ago, but greatly accelerated after Oslo in 1993, when the Palestinian propagandists gained unfettered access to television in order to spread their virus. We are now well into the second generation of children reared on this vile mixture.

What happens if “peace” ever comes? What peace can these children ever know, even if by some miracle the gangsters running the Palestinian Authority decide to stop their jihad against the Jews?

A former officer of the Hitler Youth is interviewed for “Obsession”. He describes how difficult it was to overcome the intensive long-term Nazi indoctrination of his childhood. He also gives his opinion that the Palestinian indoctrination of children is much worse, and much more effective, than what was inflicted on him.

One of the contributors at the Polish-language website Europa21 sent us these photos and this description of yesterday’s pro-Israel demonstration in Warsaw:

About 200-250 gathered in front of Warsaw’s main synagogue to show their support for Israel amid fighting in southern Lebanon that has gone on for nearly three weeks. People prayed for all victims of this war — both for Israelis and Lebanese. And there was a really great asmosphere — this demonstration was really for peace — and for all the people who suffered.There were no agressive slogans or songs. We were there to celebrate our hope for the future and for peace.

Last week a pro-Israeli demonstration took place in Kiev in Ukraine. About 5,000 people gathered to show their support for Israel.

Sunday, July 30, 2006

In a couple of posts last week, when I was feeling cynical, paranoid, and pessimistic, I wrote about the possibility that the Saudis had shortened the Bush administration’s chain, and that the fix was in: a deal was being cut on Lebanon to satisfy the Desert Masters, and the screws were thus being appropriately applied to the Israelis by the Secretary of State.

My supposition was that the Saudis can control the price of oil at the margin by a modest lowering of their production, and the threat of such an action is enough to bring the leaders of the West to heel.

This assertion brought in a lot of interesting comments. One of our new commenters, “Economics” Scott (to distinguish him from “Armchair General” Scott), is entertaining and well-informed on the topic of oil production and distribution. I’m reproducing his various comments here, with some redaction for clarity:

The Russians have been outproducing the Saudis 3 to 1 since the mid 1970’s.

Add in every tinpot dictator with oil, and the now, domestic concerns for drilling, They would all LOVE to get ahold of $5 per gallon gasoline and drill like hell.

Saudi Arabia oil ministers now, were alive in the kingdom the last two “World Oil Shortage Crises” 1979 and 1985 and weren’t really happy with the three stage outcome,

a)

retooling to more fuel efficient automotive/transport fleets by 250%

b)

Near unrestrained oil drilling wildcatting worldwide that more than doubled output/reserves

c)

switching to other fuels, coal, wood, co-generation, bio as in the case of Brazil, and the west & east diversifies its fuels and become less dependant.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Oil margins are volatile, so are the market economies of the west. Inflation adjusted, we are just getting back to market prices for oil we had in the early 1980’s $28/bbl in 1983 translates to $68-$70 barrel today.

The price in 1983 supported enormous wildcat exploration and brought known marginal fields BACK into production.

U.S. may have 30 billion barrels in known offshore fields yet to be drilled not to mention what is in the Santa Barbara Channel and the one year supply in Alaska.

Having said that, If the price is right worldwide, IT will be drilled. And the push worldwide for energy diversification would accelerate and cut into oil by up to 30% just that much faster — ultimately what the Saudis fear, (expect the 25,000 member Saudi Family to take up residence in the West sometime in the next half century)

Those who fear (the appeasers) an economic crisis like the early 1980s, the Saudis included, are mainly the bankers, investment houses, and those who trade in short term fear politically.

A deep recession of about a year, a lot of bankruptcies to squeeze out the record personal and business debt of the west would do a lot of good in the long run provided inflation could be held in check.

If Iran’s oil production could be destroyed as new oil fields come online at the end of that shortage, it would be beneficial.

Then Hezbollah gets starved, the Mullah thuggocracy gets starved, and there would likely be a short nasty civil war in Iran between elements of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and the Regular Military for control of the nation’s internal assets. It might turn out good or bad. The Pasdaran has a lot of weapons.

But high oil prices are not a bad thing, just painful in the short run… like everything that is ultimately good for you after a hangover, like eating right and regular trips to the gym, it hurts but it does a world of good.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

My Good Baron Bodissey —

You are fixated on this year’s “Spot Market Price”.

Lots of OIL, most, bbbbbbillions and bbbbillions will be bought and sold on long term contracts, not month to month, based on today’s tight supply price, which could stabilize at a higher price yet.

True, quintupling the price of the “marginal oil sold outside” long-term price would make it just too costly for those buying at their maximum energy budget to pay.

This would ease demand, prices would stabilize or moderate, find another 20% world reserve in oil supply and Iran is irrelevant. If you like then Dear Baron, invade or bomb them in the short run it won’t affect price as long as those Hormuz straits are secure.

But fear not, we lived through the “Peanut Farmer from Hell as President” who fired his whole cabinet in one night, Sheesh! then the next week… double digit interest rates, double digit inflation… and the rousing “Malaise Speech” and his Malaise Index because you weren’t feeling guilty enough for being an American. Leadership does matter, it IS the economy stupid.

Fear not! In four years, billions and billions of new reserves will have been found, drilled.

AND even more oil “reserves” engineered, I hear those Japanese hybrid cars are getting 50 mpg and they’re selling them to us at a loss, and still putting on a third shifts in that production line.

If you’re truly so “werry worrwied”, you may want to learn how to farm forty acres; get a draft horse and a good mule …. as a personal economics go, consider it a long term investment in the future.

Oh, and be sure to stock up on NATO 7.62 ammunition, a few thousand rounds in your personal wine cellar ought to save you a lot of money when DEMAND goes way up.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

My Dear Baron Bodissey;

You think capitalist pig democracies will cry uncle with a little too much pain.

Get ready for some more oil price pain — Short term that is …

Hugo is ruining some of the best reservoirs in the world … Through “Socialist Command Oil Engineering” e.g. he commands it to come out of the ground and to increase !

— “From monitoring El Universal, A.M. Mora y Leon @ Publius Pundit surmises “that the U.S. needs to prepare for an oil cutoff from Venezuela” due to the “socialization” of that country’s oil industry, courtesy of Hugo Chavez: “[T]he country [is] running its oil industry into the ground with fires and accidents, something that’s never occurred until these Chavista years, a result of the firing and blacklisting of all of Venezuela’s talented and dedicated engineers and managers — who have since been replaced by Chavista operatives known for their political loyalty and not their expertise…”

Expect massive worldwide drilling. Prices have supported wildcatting for 6 months with only a 2% world pumping capacity as a buffer.

Dear Baron, sometime between 2010 and 2012 Expect 20% Excess Worldwide reserve capacity, then you can do anything your imperialist heart desires to Hugo Chavez and Mad Jad of Tehran as long as you keep those Straits of Hormuz open; it won’t affect oil prices or what the Saudis want much at all.

I’m a layman in economic matters. Although I have read Friedrich Hayek and Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams extensively, my eyelids droop and I tend to drowse off when the text drifts into heavy economic nomenclature.

As a result, all my assertions and opinions are inherently questionable.

Fortunately, we have some experts among our readers, including the formidable Starling David Hunter, so I am sure that my mistakes will be detected and corrected very quickly.

As far as the price of oil is concerned: Scott, I’m with you. Let it rise to the point that the market will bear, and then there will be enough to satisfy the demand. New reserves will be drilled or extracted from shale, or we’ll start converting garbage to fuel, or we’ll find alternative sources of energy. Things will be rocky for a while, but in the end we’ll all be better off.

But that’s from an economic standpoint. If economics were all that had to be considered, we would never have had subsidized ethanol, or oil price controls, or “windfall” taxes, or any of the other stupid productivity-suppressing stunts that the politicians are always foisting on us.

My point solely concerned the political impact of massive increases in gasoline prices.

Come the first week of November, this Administration does not want voters to be paying $10 a gallon for gas. No incumbent congressman wants his constituents pulling the lever after paying $150 for a fillup in order to get to the polling station. A politician who allowed that to happen would be forcing himself into early retirement.

So, if I’m right about the Saudis being able to drive up the price of oil significantly by modest production cuts at the margin, and if they were to make not-so-subtle hints to the Bush administration that this was about to happen if the Israelis were to overrun Lebanon and destroy Hizbullah and the Assad regime, then… Well, I suspect that a “peace” deal would be cut rather quickly.

The Israelis lose another pound of flesh; Kofi Annan presides over the process; smiling photo-ops are put together for all the leaders involved; the NYT gives it breathless coverage — you know the drill; we’ve been through it all so many times before. It makes me sick to my stomach just imagining it.

Now: if something like this is not going on, then:

Why is this administration so embarrassingly obsequious towards the Saudis?

Why did Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice call Islam “the religion of peace and love”? That was excessive behavior, way beyond any requirement of diplomatic tact.

Why did it take so long to get rid of the Wahhabist chaplains in the military?

Why did some of the most odious “charities” retain their White House access long after 9-11?

Why no public denunciation of Saudi Wahhabist funding of anti-Semitic and anti-Christian propaganda in mosques in the USA?

And, maybe most importantly: why did the entire bin Laden family get a free ride out of the country on 9/12, with barely a question asked of them?

I’m willing to entertain some rational and diplomatically expedient reasons for the above behavior. But Occam’s razor tells me that it must be the ability of the Saudi regime to put a thumb on the jugular of the world’s oil supply.

And, contrary to what the Halliburton-hating moonbat Left would have us believe, high oil prices do not appreciably benefit the oil companies. They do not make significant additional profits, because most of the extra money goes into the pockets of King Abdullah and Mad Jad and Prince Hugo. The constriction of demand that accompanies higher prices is not useful to businesses that sell oil for a living.

What the oil companies (and governments and banks) want is price stability. Let the price go up if it needs to, and then stay there for a nice long time. Price fluctuations discourage investment, exploration, and new technologies, because nobody has any good idea whether the expenditures will bear fruit when they mature in two or five or ten years’ time.

And price stability is what the nutcase Islamist regime in Iran seems determined to prevent. My guess is that the Saudis would like nothing better than nice, stable, moderate oil prices, so that they can continue to buy their booze and their blondes and their Ferraris without worrying that some wildcat Texan is going to figure out how to extract oil from sand in a cost-effective manner and put them right out of business.

OK, boys: now tell me all the different ways I’m wrong. I’m ready to hear it.

“We believe … it’s a lone individual acting out his antagonism,” said David Gomez, an FBI assistant special agent in charge of counterterrorism in Seattle.

[…]

Gutt said the FBI is helping Seattle police assess whether the gunman was a “lone wolf” or part of a wider plan. If evidence of a terrorist plot evolved, the FBI would become the lead agency, but as of Friday night the case remained Seattle’s, Gutt said.

Dymphna has been ill and out of the loop, so I was filling her in on the news tonight over dinner. I explained how it was like pulling teeth to get the police and the FBI to utter the word “Muslim”, and how they were bending over backwards to keep the dreaded T-word out of their statements.

“Well,” she said, “Is it really terrorism when a guy is just acting on his own like that?”

I said, “Considering that Zawahiri just issued his call to all the Muslims of the world for jihad against the Jews, is it a coincidence that this Islmaist wacko starts shooting Jews in Seattle? It may not be terrorism, but it sure as hell is jihad.”

“Well,” she said, “I’d agree with that.”

So let’s call it what it is: Jihad. Part of the Great Islamic Jihad.

Without orders from Jihad Central, without direction from above, without being a part of cell in a terrorist cell, a murderer was performing jihad, according to the dictates of the Koran. Murdering Jews for Allah.

A zealous Islamist, who is also Ali Eteraz’ cousin, seems to have hacked into his blog:

Today my apostate cousin Eteraz is further expressing his idiocy by arguing that attacking Jews is a bad thing. This, after he argued that Jews aren’t apes and swine! He clearly does not want to be part of Hizbollah. That’s fine with me: just means I don’t have to share my cool Islamic green colored Hizbollah jacket with him (the jacket being the sole reason I joined them). I am beginning to think that Eteraz has turned into a Jew. But I did not notice his nose grow larger so maybe he is turning a Jew from the inside. Then again, he is Punjabi, and as such, his nose is quite large already; so perhaps he has always been a Jew! Astaghfirullah!

For the last two weeks many residents of northern Israel have been living in bomb shelters as Hizbullah’s rockets continue to strike. Life in the shelters is a deadening combination of fear and tedium, and young children are particularly hard-hit by these circumstances.

As the owner of www.toystore.co.il I am leading my own personal campaign to send thousands of dollars worth of toys to the children of Northern Israel. Instead of enjoying themselves in summer camp, the Israeli children living in Northern Israel are currently spending long tense days in their local bomb shelters. There is a huge need for toys and games to keep them occupied.

As of Friday, July 22, we have distributed over $12,000 of toys. Some of the recipients of our donations have been Rivka Ziv Hospital in Safed (Tsfat), city wide Community Centers in Safed, the Merom HaGalil Regional Council (who has distributed to their 24 towns and villages), and city wide Community Centers in Tiberias.

We are supplying all the toys and games at cost plus 10% to cover expenses.

On most of the toys sent up last Friday, www.ToyStore.co.il was able to obtain a 30% discount on WHOLESALE prices. So the donations really went a long way.

I really wish that this project were unnecessary. But as the war drags through it’s second week, I have received many phone calls requesting toy and game donations.

To make a donation, simply go to my website www.toystore.co.il , order a gift certificate for the amount you want to donate, proceed to the checkout and write “Donate Now” in the window marked “Special instructions for your order”. Please include your name, telephone number and email address.

Friday, July 28, 2006

The Club for Growth has published the record of the Porkers who reside in the hallowed halls of The House of Representatives. It does not look good:

Thanks to Congressman Jeff Flake’s 19 anti-pork amendments, we now have every House member on record regarding their positions on earmarks. Before now, House members have been able to avoid scrutiny because their pork was co-mingled with other projects and tucked into the dark corners of big spending bills. Or they were able to withstand the scrutiny because they were attacked as a whole chamber and not directly attacked themselves.

But because of Flake’s amendments, they were recently forced to cast up-or-down votes on specific projects. They could no longer deflect attention.

The following statement was issued today by House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL), Majority Leader John Boehner (R-OH), and Rules Committee Chairman David Dreier (R-CA):

“The House-passed lobbying and ethics reform bill includes a series of significant reforms meant to bring greater transparency and accountability to the congressional earmarking practice. House Republicans are committed to extending these reforms to all committees and implementing them during the current session of Congress, before any spending or tax bill for the upcoming fiscal year goes to the President’s desk.

“After Labor Day, the House is likely to consider, among other items, a number of important appropriations conference reports for the upcoming fiscal year. If the House and Senate have not produced a final lobbying and ethics reform conference report by the time we return from our August district work period in September, the House will move to immediately adopt and implement a comprehensive earmark reform rules change independent of the ongoing lobbying and ethics reform discussions to ensure these new rules apply to all spending and tax measures that will go to the President’s desk this fall.

“The American people want meaningful change in the way in which Congress spends their money. House Republicans are committed to delivering this change.”

Notice they do not commit themselves to going clean. See, they know they can handle it, so they’ll just earmark a little bit. They can handle pork, see. No need to quit entirely. Have your ever seen the list of questions that Alcoholics Anonymous uses — or used to use — to ascertain if your drinking is out of control? This questionnaire, developed by a psychiatrist dates, back to 1930. There are newer ones now, but this one is instructive, especially if you substitute “earmarking” for substance abuse. In this questionnaire, you only have to answer three or four items positively to be squarely in “the-guy-with-a-problem” category:

1.

Do you lose time from work due to your drinking porking? ( i.e., are you away from the office being wined and dined by the hordes of lobbyists on the Hill?

2.

Is drinking making your home life unhappy? (is anyone back in your district muttering about fiscal responsibility?)

3.

Do you drink because you are shy with other people? (how much courage does it take to say “NO!” to your peers’ earmarks?)

4.

Is drinking affecting your reputation? (are you going to have to fend off questions about your fiscal restraint or lack of it in the coming election?)

5.

Have you ever felt remorse after drinking? (bet you do, especially if you voted for that bridge in Alaska)

6.

Have you gotten into financial difficulties as a result of your drinking? (i.e., have you raised concerns about our deficit spending?)

7.

Do you turn to lower companions and an inferior environment when drinking? (you know, those sleazy lobbyists with their come-on, bedroom eyes)

8.

Does your drinking make you careless of your family’s country’s welfare?

9.

Has your ambition decreased since drinking? (or has it increased? Or, are you looking at the possibility of another line of work if you get fired for excessive porking? See question 7: you may end up as a lobbyist)

10.

Do you crave a drink at a definite time daily? (that is, when you go without earmarking for too long, do you suffer withdrawal effects?)

To use the terminology of the Platonists and Christian theology, our congressmen are suffering from a disordered appetite, a poorly-developed faculty of reason, and a problem with their God-given will power.

Time for citizens to help them recover their spiritual side so they can stop RUNNING THIS COUNTRY INTO THE GROUND! As you know, the first step is to admit that the problem is bigger than you are. Surrender would be tremendously difficult for a politician.

As much as I admire our Congressman, Virgil Goode, he failed the Pork test. This is very sad, considering that several years ago he’d moved from the “wuzzadem” category to the right side. But he’s been voting fiscally left. That hurts.

UPDATE: Here is the voting record for all the congressional representatives in Virginia:

1

Davis, J

R

3

2

Drake

R

0

3

Scott

R

0

4

Forbes

R

0

5

Goode

R

0

6

Goodlatte

R

0

7

Cantor

R

3

8

Moran

D

0

9

Boucher

D

0

10

Wolf

R

0

11

Davis, T

R

3

In the overall rankings of states who benefit most from pork, Virginia doesn’t fare so well: it’s #32, with a per capita pork chop of $26.19.

2006 Rank

State

2006 Pork

Population

Per Capita

2005 Rank

Change

1

Alaska

$325,106K

663,661

$489.87

1

0

2

Hawaii

$482,399K

1,275,194

$378.29

3

1

3

D.C.

$100,236K

550,521

$182.07

2

-1

4

W. Virginia

$239,069K

1,816,856

$131.58

4

0

5

N. Dakota

$78,537K

636,677

$123.35

7

2

Read it and weep, knowing that the confiscatory tax rate you are paying is going to fund things like the International Fund for Ireland, which received $13.5 million dollars, including monies for the World Toilet Summit. Follow the link to Ireland’s funding and read the long, long list of oinkers. Something has to be done. Anything from “throw the rascals out” to a flat tax would suit me fine.

This is beyond scandal. To lift a phrase from the Baron, this is Pork Porn.

Second is “Patrick Henry” who has composed some snappy little numbers that you really don’t want to miss. His most recent is “Hey, Bin Laden”, which is too short to quote from without spoiling the jokes.

But here’s a snip from an earlier masterpiece called “It’s in the Koran”:

There has been a spike in the number of rape charges in Scandinavia in recent years. It has reached near epidemic proportions in Sweden. Although there are indications of a very high percentage of Muslim immigrants on the statistics, as it is with other kinds of crime, immigration is a non-issue for the political establishment a few weeks ahead of the Swedish national elections.

In neighboring Norway, there is an unprecedented rape wave in the capital city of Oslo. “We have to be realistic. A series of rapes have made Oslo unsafe during the summer,” says Brit Opjordsmoen from DIXI, support centre for rape victims. “When we know that there are rapists on the loose in Oslo, we have to listen to advice from the police. They are right in warning women against going home alone at night.”

Opjordsmoen thinks it is astounding that Minister of Justice Knut Storberget gives advice contrary to that of the police, encouraging women not to change their behavior. “Ideally, we can all agree that girls should be able to move around freely, but we have to be realistic. Society is not like that. Many girls are too naïve, we have to be careful and watch out. Several rapes assaults in a short period of time is unusual,” says Opjordsmoen.

According to the support centre, rapes are usually committed by a person known to the victim. The peculiar thing about the many rapes in the city of Oslo now is that they are rapes by ambush, committed by strangers against women on their way home from a bar or in areas with little traffic. “We have seen a dramatic increase [in the number of rapes],” says Endre Sandvik, head of the emergency ward. The number of rapes in Oslo this summer is more than twice as high as it was last year.

In a questions and answers session with newspaper Aftenposten’s readers, Opjordsmoen has some politically correct comments, saying that they don’t know what percentage of these rapes are committed by people with immigrant background, and that much of these speculations is just “prejudice.”

With all due respect, I’m pretty sure that’s incorrect. Just a few weeks earlier, Aftenposten warned that “youths” are in the process of destroying Norway’s capital city, Oslo. Upon closer inspection, it turned out that these “youths” bear a striking resemblance to the same “youths” with Muslim immigrant background that are destroying so many cities across Western Europe. I know Norwegian girls that have experienced harassment by gangs, and it almost always involves Muslims: Turks, Kurds, Arabs, Pakistanis, and Somalis.

A 17-year-old Somalian was convicted of the rape of a young girl in Oslo one year ago. The court stated that the rape was unusually brutal and lasted for several hours. The Somalian choked the girl for so long that the medical doctor who examined the girl said that she could have died. The girl is now suffering from severe psychological problems in the aftermath of the attack. The youth was sentenced to four and half years in prison. The sentence also included another rape, where his Norwegian-Moroccan friend raped a 13-year-old girl whilst the Somalian helped to threaten her and keep guard. She has been traumatized from the incident.

Unni Wikan, a professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo, in 2001 said that “Norwegian women must take their share of responsibility for these rapes” because Muslim men found their manner of dress provocative. The professor’s conclusion was not that Muslim men living in the West needed to adjust to Western norms, but the exact opposite: “Norwegian women must realize that we live in a Multicultural society and adapt themselves to it.”

The numbers published in September 2001 were discussed in at least to out of Norway’s three largest newspapers: Aftenposten and Dagbladet. A leading member of the Liberal Party (Venstre), Odd Einar Dørum, demanded that all the numbers should be put on the table: “A scumbag is a scumbag, regardless of skin color”.

From 2001 to 2005, Dørum was Minister of Justice, and yet nobody has seen these statistics since 2001. The number of rape charges in Oslo has continued to rise, reaching record levels in 2005. There is ample evidence of brutal gang rapes, something that used to be rare in Scandinavia, being committed by immigrants against native girls. For instance, 21st of July 2005, three men were charged with gang raping a 15-year-old Norwegian girl, who was dragged into a car while waiting for a bus at the bus station in the town of Fredrikstad. All the men were of “foreign origin”. Such cases have become almost routine. The only possible explanation for why we are no longer presented statistics showing the percentage of immigrants involved in this is that the authorities are covering it up. Usually, this would have made the media call for the government’s resignation. This has not happened, although I know several journalists have been reading the posts I have made about this topic, both in Englishand in Norwegian.

In Sweden, ethnologist Maria Bäckman, in her study “Whiteness and gender,” has followed a group of Swedish girls in the suburb of Rinkeby outside Stockholm, where native Swedes have been turned into a tiny minority of the inhabitants due to rapid immigration. Bäckman relates that several of the girls she interviewed stated that they had dyed their hair to avoid unwanted attention and sexual harassment. They experienced that being blonde involves old men staring at you, cars honking their horns and boys calling you “whore.”

A report from organization Save the Children tells of how being a young Swedish girl today means feeling unsafe. The girls are scared of being raped, a possibility that appears very real to them. Many girls are planning how to go home at night, how to pretend to be talking on the mobile phone, how to keep their keys in their hand to defend themselves or how to simply run all the way home. Both the fear and the choice of strategies indicate that many girls feel genuinely unsafe outdoors during certain hours of the day. The fear is well founded. A striking number of girls have experienced harassment from boys or men. Most frequently, the harassment comes from boys of the same age as the girls. Being called “whore” has become so common in some schools that several of the girls say the teachers no longer react to this.

Tensta is a suburb in northern Stockholm with a very high concentration of Muslim immigrants. Actress Ylva Törnlund has visited several schools in Tensta, and was alarmed by the harsh atmosphere she discovered there. “The attitudes we meet in the schools are frightening. One boy talked about how girls should be f**ked to pieces until they bleed,” Törnlund said.

This trend is not exclusive to Scandinavia. It is the same all over Western Europe wherever we find significant numbers of Muslim immigrants. In fact, the number of rapes committed by Muslim immigrants in Western nations is so extremely high that it is difficult to view them only as random acts of individuals. It resembles warfare. German journalist Gudrun Eussner considers this to be “sexuality as a weapon against disobedient and non-Muslim women, both categorized as “unbelievers”. Against them jihad is the duty, and what to do with women “conquered” in jihad, this may be read in the Qur’an: they become slaves to be used by the victors.”

French filmmaker Pierre Rehov states that: “A friend of mine is a retired chief of police, who used to be in charge of the security of a major city in the south of France. He reported to me that his men had to face an average of 10 rapes a week, 80% made by Muslim young men. 30% being what we call, in French, a “tournante,” meaning that the victim is being raped by an entire gang, one after the other, often during an entire night.” “He was astonished that, in most cases, the parents not only would back up their rapist children, but also would not even understand why they would be arrested. There is an instant shift in the notion of good and evil as a major component of culture. The only evil those parents would see, genuinely, is the temptation that the male children had to face. Since in most cases the victims were not Muslims, the parents’ answer and rejection was even more genuine: how could their boys be guilty of anything, when normally answering to a provocation by occidental women, known for their unacceptable behavior?”

According to Rehov, “I can see in any raping of a non-Muslim woman by a Muslim male a racist action, and it is high time for us to acknowledge and condemn it. The level of contempt towards non-Muslim women is the reflection of the level of hatred towards the society which creates equality between men and women.”

In Norway, it is probably unprecedented in the thousand years since the city of Oslo was founded at the end of the Viking Age that the indigenous population is being attacked on such a large scale for the sole reason of being white and Christian. And the government is doing… well, pretty much nothing really, except for hiding the problem as much as possible. This isn’t good enough. I have earlier called for the resignation of Swedish PM Göran Persson for his government’s total inability to protect a population that pays the highest taxes in the world. Perhaps the time has come for calling for the resignation of Norwegian PM Jens Stoltenberg and his cabinet, too.

If they want to stay in power, they should immediately double if not triple the amount of police officers in the streets, and they should end the Multicultural experiment and stop Muslim immigration completely, if necessary by withdrawing from the UN Convention for Refugees and other international treaties, pulling out of the Schengen Agreement and re-establish genuine, national and popular control over immigration.

We are tired of hearing nonsense about “Islamophobia” and xenophobia while our children live in fear of Islamic terrorism and our daughters cannot go home after dark out of fear of gang rapes by Muslim youngsters who view them as whores. The purpose of the state is to uphold law and order and maintain the nation’s borders and territorial integrity. Western European governments are doing neither, yet are busy with political censorship and interfering with details of our private lives where they have no business.

It’s time they are reminded that they are our servants, not our rulers. If they will not fulfill their duties, they need to be replaced by somebody who will.

Wednesday, July 26, 2006

I received an e-mail earlier today from a Pakistani woman whose relative was killed as an honor killing by family members. The family and the police are covering up the murder as a suicide. This woman feels that her life is in danger now, and she desperately needs help. I believe her e-mail is genuine. If you know of an organization or personal contact in Islamabad that can help her (obviously, NOT the police), please send the contact information to me at misskelly99-at-gmail.com. Please keep her in your prayers. Thank you very much for your help.

Does anyone know of Pakistani organizations who provide refuge for women? Considering that the abuse of women in Pakistan stands at about 70% (last time I checked the Human Rights Watch stats some months ago), there must be some ngo set up to help in such cases.

Ridicule is a powerful weapon in the arsenal of Western Civilization. The most crucial part of the struggle against the Great Islamic Jihad takes place in the media of the West itself. This is an information war, and the Jihad has a distinct advantage, since large sections of Western media are willing (even eager) dupes of the mujahideen. Hizbullah’s use of civilians as shields and camouflage, followed by the feeding of photos and video footage of the inevitable carnage to media outlets, is just the latest example of the ruthless and shrewd manipulation of the West’s information systems by the Islamists.

But we have a weapon unavailable to the jihadis: humor. Islam is humor-impaired, and necessarily so, since ridicule and satire are a threat to its very foundation. The Islamists are unable to respond in kind — have you ever noticed how relentlessly stupid their “Zionists and Crusaders” jokes are?

The Great Jihad has no defense against being made fun of.

So — let’s mock them copiously and frequently:

Borrow this graphic and all the other ones at Gates of Vienna, and share them.

Earlier this week, I posted about the sneak attack on Jeff Goldstein. From out of the blue he was assaulted by deadly falafel balls and then his assailants escaped on Vespas before he was able to retaliate.

The incident got me to thinking: what would be the perfect response? After pondering it a bit, I came up with what I deemed the perfect (and thereby disproportionate) response retaliation for this small battle in the Long War.

What I had in mind was hitting them with some Texas-style barbeque sauce on pulled pork. I should have said parenthetically that this was mixing cuisines since pulled pork is mostly North Carolina and Tennessee. But I needed the pork for my retaliation, and I needed that goopy, viscous Texas sauce, too. So I combined ’em.

Big mistake. Texans came out of the woodwork to remind me that there ain’t no such thing as “Texas pulled pork”. I hate it when people spoil a good story by insisting on verisimilitude. So I wrote an update to the post, which the Baron liked so much that now I’m doing this uber-update, which pushes further up the page my response to those who wrinkled their nose at the idea of my saucy dish.

You might want to go to the link above to see Jeff Goldstein’s original story and my response. Then, what follows below is a copy of my flailing response to those Texans. Just consider it a coda to the first flights of fanciful revenge.

And if that’s clear, you’re a genius.

By the way, do you think anyone will ever google "Texas Pulled Pork Bab-b-q"? Sure would beat all those searches we get for "make a b0m" -- mostly from abroad, by the way. Not too many b*mb-builders here. Or at least they don't use Google for advice.

UPDATE: A reminder for all of y’all nit-pickin’ Texas commenters and e-mailers out there:

Satire doesn’t have to be accurate, just amusing. Yes, I know Texas “don’t pull pork”; y’all tend to be beef people, anyways. However, my dilemma was that pulled pork usually has thin North Carolina sauce, which, while very good, is not viscous enough to really gum up the works of the fleeing Vespas.

When faced with a choice of humor over reality, I always choose the former. Fortunately, there are enough non-Texans out there who wouldn’t notice my sleight of hand…or wouldn’t have if you guys hadn’t had to tromp onstage in your boots and stop the story in the name of accuracy…

A pox on reality. Do you *really* think Mr. Goldstein was attacked with great balls of falafel? Of course not. For my purposes, this particular batch of pulled pork with its viscous Texas-style sauce continues to slop around in its tin tub aboard the helicopter — which is chasing the Vespas, who now realize that Fate is about to descend upon them in the form of a haram End to It All.

Oh, wait a minute! it’s not a helicopter carrying the tub, it’s flying pigs. Yes, that’s it: Texas pulled pork barbeque sloshes in a galvanized tin tub, which is being carried aloft by Mighty Flying Pigs. I can see it now, as they inexorably catch up to the Vespas, the latter desperately putt-putting down the dirt road while bits of rust fly off, making the Vespas lighter with each mile. Suddenly, from on high, …SPLOPPP!!![followed by a tin tub bonging into the underbrush like a broken liberty bell, while the feathery swish of flapping swine wings recede, and garbled Arabic cursing rises in the background]. Blue-helmeted guys with large towels — *Turkish* terrycloth towels, mind you — and Vespa repair manuals saunter in, stage left…

meanwhile, stage right, enter annoyed Texans in big boots who proceed to stomping on the sauce.

Mad Jad is saying that things are going to happen, or that, if they do, nobody should be surprised, because we all have “hurricanes” coming. In particular, I think Mad Jad’s use of the term “hurricane” - supposedly AP tells us, from a proverb - interesting. I hope Homeland Security is on alert.

Is India feeling some of the premonitory breezes from the coming storm? According to a story in The Times of India (warning to readers — expect numerous popup ads at this site):

US embassy put on terror alert

The next few days are likely to be very tense for the US embassy here. For a top IB official has sent a letter to security agencies with a chilling message the American embassy is expected to be targetted any time between now and July 30 by terrorists owing allegiance to an Iranian terror group.

This intelligence input has already sent security agencies scampering to plug real or imagined weaknesses in the security ring around the mission. Sources revealed on Monday that the input was received early last week and has been circulated among all security agencies in Delhi, including the police and paramilitary forces.

“The US embassy has been on an extremely high state of alert and things will remain the same for the next few days. The input has even identified one of the men likely to participate in the attack and efforts are on to establish his presence,” said a source.

[…]

“The threat is that they would launch an all-out assault in the nature of a ‘fidayeen’ attack. The security review was done in keeping with this possibility,” said the official. According to the input, the Iranians in the group of 20 are associated with a Iran terror group comprising terrorists who earlier backed Saddam Hussein.

The alert has also left many wondering if international terrorist groups are trying to join hands with Kashmir terror groups. The letter specifically mentions that people of Kashmiri descent are expected to help the Iranians and Afghans carry out the attack. [emphasis added]

I saw a story yesterday about some Christian groups who interpret current events in the Middle East as a sign of the imminent arrival of the End Times.

But the problem isn’t the Christian chiliasts, it’s the Islamic ones, particularly Iran’s ruling Shi’ite oligarchy. They believe the Millennium is about to arrive, that the Twelfth Imam will soon appear to usher in the End, and that they are his appointed assistants.

And they are about to acquire nuclear weapons, while we dither around with the EU and the UN and the IAEA and Iran’s lapdog, Mohammed El Baradei.

I have a split personality when it comes to geopolitical issues. My Dr. Jeckyll is a naïve optimist, tends to believe what people say, and assumes good motives on the part of other people. My Mr. Hyde is suspicious and paranoid, looking for the secret and devious true story beneath all the surface gloss.

Yesterday my paranoid side was active when I said, concerning Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s trip to Lebanon and Israel, “The fix is in.”

The United States has given Israeli forces between 10 and 14 days to finish dealing Hezbollah “a strategic blow,” a senior Israeli Foreign Ministry official told FOX News, as both Israeli forces and Hezbollah guerrillas continued to volley rockets across the Lebanon-Israel border.

Mr. Hyde says:

A deal has been cut. Saudi Arabia’s hand was hovering over the oil spigot, so Israel’s chain has been duly yanked tight around its neck.

If he’s right, then Hizbullah will live to fight another day, and that is a huge, huge, victory for Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah. Lebanon will be completely in his thrall after all the dust settles.

And we, the defenders of Western Civilization, will live to rue the day that we did not give Israel a chance to finish the job.

Hezbollah is militarily defeated some weeks hence, but before then, some other event occurs that serves to keep the region in a period of flux. This period of flux will continue until one of two outcomes is sustained: the US and its allies find themselves involved in an overt war with Iran, or Iran becomes a declared nuclear power. The events that contribute to the period of flux could be friendly actions, such as new initiatives in Iraq or diplomatic initiatives in the Levant; or Iranian actions, such as a new intifada-like campaign in Iraq, or the attempted closing of the Straits of Hormuz, or the testing of a ballistic missile.

Monday, July 24, 2006

I don’t know what to make of this, but I was out picking up lunch from a small middle eastern restaurant near the university when three men, their faces partially obscured by green and yellow bandanas, launched an orchestrated strike on me using heavy falafel balls and what I think must have been shanklish.

I wasn’t seriously injured—one of the falafel balls grazed my shoulder, while the shanklish overshot me and landed on a table to my flank, causing a bit of shawarma to lodge in a toddler’s ear and some tabbouleh juice to blind his mother momentarily—but unfortunately, in the ensuing chaos the three attackers were able to flee the scene on a pair of old, dirt-crusted Vespas.

But the really strange part of all this was that I hadn’t even begun to wipe the fried chick pea detritus off my Fubu madras before a nattily dressed gentleman claiming to be from the State Department slipped me his card and told me that, should I wish to respond to the attack, I’d have roughly ten days to do so.

After that, he said, I would either have to go back to being a Zionist oppressor hated by the vast majority of the world, or else “come up with some of that really funny Jew stuff like Larry David does.”

Developing…

My first thought on reading about his adventurous lunch was, “Gosh, I wish we had a place that sold falafel nearby.” All you can get around here is Billy Bob’s Pulled Pork Bar-Bee-Que. And they’re not open on Mondays anyway. Or during hunting season. Or sometimes for no reason I can ascertain. Billy Bob is an artiste when it comes to pulled pork; mere humans don’t question the vagaries of operating hours.

My second thought was, “Gosh, I wonder what a proportionate response to this attack would be…?”

My third thought was, “Proportionate? Are you nuts? This was an unprovoked attack with a cannon ball-like missile. It demands the DISPROPORTIONATE RESPONSE from hell.”

Having revved myself up with this train of thought, I decided to add my comment to his growing list of responses. However, as is often the case with my comments, I went on a bit long. When you do that, it means you need your own blog… which is how this one started: from taking up too much bandwidth at The Belmont Club [I’d link to the Club, but Wretchard needs my link like he needs… like he needs a smaller house. Besides, anyone who is reading this has already been to see him at least once today].

So instead of leaving a response at Mr. Goldstein’s place, I came home to drop it here. I think you’ll agree it is too long to be within the limits of courtesy, comment-wise. However, scenarios of revenge do get me going. So here’s my original comment, deleted there and dragged home for your perusal.

Just keep in mind that the weapon of choice was falafel balls, and some commenters were already going into phallic mode with that:

A proportionate response would be a galvanized tub full of Billy Bob’s pulled pork bar-b-q airlifted and dumped on the Vespa riders. Preferably the Texas pulled pork since it tends to be stickier than North Carolina’s more gentlemanly version.

And, there is something equally phallic about “pulled pork”, is there not? It’s at least as manly as great balls of falafel. So you have the perfect storm: haram food, ridicule of their manhood — if pulling pork doesn’t do it what will? — and an air strike.

Maybe line up some peacekeepers ahead of time to help the masked terrorists clean their Vespas. Given the nature of Texas sauce, be sure to procure (so to speak) at least one blue hat that knows something about carburetors.

I now invite our readers to describe their own scenarios of revenge. Just keep it PG-13, please. We have a ladies’ agreement with The Headmistress on that. You see, we have children from her homeschool coming over to learn politics and history and current events and such. Be a good example to them.

It’s okay to be brilliant, though. I mean, Mr. Goldstein is pretty brilliant here, and you’ll have to admit the phallic imagery is subtle.

By all means, make your response as disproportionate as possible.

UPDATE: A reminder for all of y'all nit-pickin' Texas commenters and emailers out there:

Satire doesn't have to be accurate, just amusing. Yes, I know Texas "don't pull pork"; y'all tend to be beef people, anyways. However, my dilemma was that pulled pork usually has thin North Carolina sauce, which, while very good, is not viscous enough to really gum up the works of the fleeing Vespas.

When faced with a choice of humor over reality, I always choose the former. Fortunately, there are enough non-Texans out there who wouldn't notice my sleight of hand...or wouldn't have if you guys hadn't had to tromp onstage in your boots and stop the story in the name of accuracy...

A pox on reality. Do you *really* think Mr. Goldstein was attacked with great balls of falafel? Of course not. For my purposes, this particular batch of pulled pork with its viscous Texas-style sauce continues to slop around in its tin tub aboard the helicopter -- which is chasing the Vespas.

Oh, wait a minute! it's not a helicopter carrying the tub, it's flying pigs. Yes, that's what it is: Texas pulled pork barbeque in a galvanized tin tub being lifted aloft by Mighty Flying Pigs. I can see it even now, as they inexorably catch up with the Vespas, the latter desperately putt-putting down the dirt road while bits of rust fly off, making the Vespas lighter with each mile. Suddenly...SPLOPPP!!![followed by sounds of muffled Arabic cursing in the background]...blue-helmeted guys with large towels -- *Turkish* terrycloth towels, mind you -- and Vespa repair manuals saunter in, stage left...

Thousands of left-wing activists, including many Arab citizens, marched Saturday evening from the Rabin Square to the Cinematheque plaza in Tel Aviv in protest of the fighting in Lebanon. The protestors held up signs with slogans against the war and called for an immediate ceasefire.

According to the demonstrators, a prisoner exchange deal with Hizbullah must be struck, as well as a similar deal with Hamas. Marchers also urged IDF soldiers not to take part in the Lebanon operation, chanting: “Listen up, soldier - it’s your duty to refuse.” Other slogans recited by the participants were: “The occupation is a disaster, leave Lebanon now,” “Olmert and Bush have struck a deal - to carry on with the occupation,” and “Children in Beirut and Haifa want to go on living.”

Words fail me. Dymphna and I were talking about “suicide Jews” this morning, but we meant the ones in America who embrace the anti-Zionist Left.

International pressure mounted on the Bush administration yesterday to call for an immediate cease-fire in the hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah guerrillas as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice headed to the region in search of a long-term solution to the 12-day-old conflict.

With civilian casualties in Lebanon mounting, the United States’ Arab allies added their voices to the calls for a truce. Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, met with President Bush in the Oval Office and delivered a letter from King Abdullah II asking him to intervene.

Oil prices dropped Monday after the Saudi oil minister said OPEC wanted to avoid an economically disruptive increase in oil prices and as U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice traveled to the Mideast to try to find a diplomatic solution to the violence in Lebanon and Israel.

Occam’s razor on rare occasions supports the paranoid explanation for events, and this is one of them. In terms of American policy towards Saudi Arabia, the paranoid theory multiplies the fewest needless entities.

The Despot of the Desert, with a mere flick of a finger, can make Americans pay $10 for a gallon of gas. So, when he yanks the chain of the Bush Administration, Condi goes to Israel to yank Ehud Olmert’s chain, stopping off in Lebanon on the way to pick up the terms of the deal she is required to “craft” with Israel in order to “jump-start the peace process.” Or some similar wording from the State Department Middle East Style Book.

It’s an effective protection racket the Saudis have going. Hizbullah and Iran get too big for their britches: fine, let Israel kneecap them. But don’t whack ’em! No, they come in handy from time to time, so Israel must “show restraint.”

And so the message goes out: Nice little economy you’ve got there. Wouldn’t want anything to happen to it. And then the obedient diplomatic helicopters start landing in the capitals of the Middle East.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

All right, that’s the paranoid explanation. I hope it’s wrong.

And, for the sake of argument in this symposium I’m going to assume it’s wrong.

I’m a neophyte in matters of military strategy, weaponry, and intelligence, so I try to stay informed by reading the Belmont Club, Chester, the Counterterrorism Blog, and Kingdom of Chaos, among other blogs. Those guys know much more than I’ll ever learn; I recommend daily visits to them if you want to keep up to speed on the current crisis.

Assuming that Israel’s chain does not get yanked; here is a general outline of events as they are likely to unfold, drawn from the above sources:

Israel will continue to do battlefield prep by air in southern Lebanon, while operating across the border against dug-in Hizbullah assets.

The IAF will continue to target the supply lines from Syria to Hizbullah, and the IDF will eventually mount a major incursion to completely cut off the route through the Bekaa Valley to the border with Israel.

The major Hizbullah infrastructure in the Bekaa Valley will have to be destroyed in a ground assault. Depending on the military necessities, this may involve some air operations against targets in Syria.

Israel will plant forces north of the Litani river, either by airborne drop or via an amphibious landing (the latter a very intriguing suggestion put forth in several blogs).

With Hizbullah completely cut off by land, sea, and air, a massive ground operation, taking at least several weeks, will pound the terrorists, their weapons, and their installations into dust.

Just for the sake of argument, let’s assume that something like the above will in fact happen.

What happens next? What will the Middle East look like after Hizbullah?

What happens to Syria? What does Syria have besides Hizbullah? It’s got some of Saddam’s old WMDs, a lot of sand, and presumably some olive trees and date palms. But on a “Principal Products” map of the Middle East, Syria’s main product icon would be a little picture of Sheik Hassan Nasrallah. Take that away, and what does Syria do to hold its head up in the honor-sensitive Arab world?

What happens to Iran? How do they respond to having their best boy whipped? How will they bring their influence to bear in the Maghreb after Hizbullah is gone? Will they drop Boy Assad as an ally once he has outlived his Hizbullah-related usefulness? How will it affect their nuclear efforts?

I’m too ignorant to venture any answers to these questions myself. I invite readers to respond, either here or on their own blogs, and thereby help make up for my lack of expertise.

CrusaderNews24 July-Iran-Tehran was swept with riots by Irish Christian fundamentalist immigrants again today in the wake of an editorial in the influential Iranian newspaper “Insha Allah” alleging that Saint Patrick drank mead and may have been an alcoholic. So far damage estimates are in the millions of rials.

[…]

The Pope mobilized the Swiss Guard and again called for a Holy Crusade against Islam, with large crowds outside St Peter’s angrily thundering “Deus vult! Deus vult!” (“God wills it”) in response to a mass condemning Muslims to hellfire and perdition. He was echoed by Pat Robertson in the United States…

I like the part about Benedict mobilizing the Swiss Guard…on the other hand, if things continue as they are in Italy, he may need to do so, just before he calls the IDF for help.

Sunday, July 23, 2006

When the Arab Muslims, a collection of backward, nomadic warrior tribes who did not even have a fully developed script, conquered Egypt, Syria and Iran, they took control over some of the world’s largest centres of accumulated knowledge. To say that “Muslims” or “Islamic culture” created the civilizations of the Middle East can be compared to an illiterate person storming into the planet’s largest library, killing all the librarians and then claiming to have written all the books there. The cultural superiority of the Middle East in relation to Europe did not begin with Islam’s entry into the area. In fact, it ended with it… Islam’s much-vaunted “Golden Age” was in reality just the twilight of the conquered pre-Islamic cultures, an echo of times passed.

And another:

The EU elites see themselves as Julius Caesar or Octavian, but end up being Brutus, stabbing their own peoples in the back. They want to recreate the Roman Empire on both sides of the Mediterranean, bound together by some vague references to a “shared Greek heritage.” Instead, they are creating a civilizational breakdown across much of Western Europe as the barbarians are overrunning the continent. The EU wants to recreate the Roman Empire and ends up creating the second fall of Rome.

The deteriorating situation in Lebanon has received a lot of news coverage in Norway in the past few weeks. Only days after hostilities in the region broke out, our prime minister Jens Stoltenberg, pledged to send 200 million Nkr (35 million US$) to the Lebanese and Palestinian governments, in an effort to relieve the suffering of the local population. The Norwegian government also strongly condemned the actions of the Israeli military, which they feel are disproportionate and in breach of international law.

I feel like an unfortunate pedestrian must have felt during the Great Boston Molasses Disaster: engulfed, knocked down, and asphyxiated by a treacly flood of politically correct verbiage.

It’s not just the aid-and-comfort-to-the-enemy aspect of all this, the fact that the donated money will eventually end up replenishing Hizbullah’s and Hamas’ lethal weaponry.

It’s the sheer obstinate stupidity of the political leaders of the West, who will sell the future of their countries and their civilization for a very transient mess of electoral pottage.

Enough! Can’t we somehow retire the word “disproportionate” from the language?

At the end of the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama pronounced that we had arrived at “The End of History”, and that capitalism and liberal democracy would now be the only global system left. But when I look at Europe today, I see democracies under threat because of an elaborate Eurabian bureaucracy and Islamic fanaticism. I see countries unwilling or unable to defend themselves against massive immigration/colonization.

Has democracy become too soft to function? Have we arrived at “the End of Democracy” rather than “the End of History?” What are the strengths and weaknesses of democracy? Are there other challenges to it in the 21st century than there were in the 20th century, and if so, what are they? What are the necessary conditions for a democratic society to work? These are massive questions. I cannot do more than scratch the surface of them here, but I’d still like to make an attempt.

One possible challenge to democracy is the resurrection of its traditional enemies, such as Fascism or Communism. Communist activists rallied in June 2006 in Berlin to pledge allegiance to the establishment of a strong, national Communist party in Germany. Proclaiming their contempt for “neo-liberal Capitalism” and the major German political parties, they declared their commitment to a “Socialist society,” nearly two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Maybe Communism never quite died. A new DDR Museum in Berlin caps a trend of “Ostalgie,” nostalgia for the former East Germany that went mainstream in 2003 with the sentimental international hit film “Goodbye Lenin.” Critics claim it is trivializing the brutality and the oppressive nature of the old regime. German Historical Museum spokesman Rudolf Trabold dismissed the project. “There’s really no need for this museum,” he fumed. “The focus is too narrow. It’s on the level of ‘Goodbye Lenin’ -- it’s filled with consumer goods from the DDR but there is no context. It’s sort of like saying, ‘Oh, wasn’t it all nice?’”

“Observer after observer, in spite of the contrary expectation with which he approached his subject, has been impressed with the extraordinary similarity in many respects of the conditions under “fascism” and “communism.” “Even communists must have been somewhat shaken by such testimonies as that of Mr. Max Eastman, Lenin’s old friend, who found himself compelled to admit that “instead of being better, Stalinism is worse than fascism, more ruthless, barbarous, unjust, immoral, anti-democratic, unredeemed by any hope or scruple,” and that it is “better described as superfascist” ; and when we find the same author recognising that “Stalinism is socialism, in the sense of being an inevitable although unforeseen political accompaniment of the nationalisation and collectivisation which he had relied upon as part of his plan for erecting a classless society,” his conclusion clearly achieves wider significance.”

“Neither good intentions nor efficiency of organisation can preserve decency in a system in which personal freedom and individual responsibility are destroyed.”

However, the challenge to liberal democracy can also come from new and more insidious threats. John Fonte of the Hudson Institute notes that “transnationalism” and “Multiculturalism” are presented as unstoppable forces of history, but in reality they are “ideological tools, championed by activist élites.” He suggests that the end of the Cold War has intensified an intracivilizational Western conflict between liberal democracy and transnational progressivism, between democrats and post-democrats. According to him, the EU “embodies transnational progressivism. Its governmental structure is post-democratic. It is unelected and, for the most part, unaccountable.”

Transnational progressivism is undemocratic and authoritarian to its core. It presupposes the rule of enlightened “experts” and élite groups over the ignorant masses, who are stupid and should not be permitted to make important decisions without supervision. Its goal is to establish a benign oligarchy, where power will reside within smaller groups which will conduct their affairs out of the public view. This line of thinking is nothing less than a frontal attack on all basic principles of freedom and democracy, disguised under a benevolent façade. It needs to be exposed as such. Transnational organizations such as the European Union are a throwback to the pre-democratic age.

One of the most serious challenges to democracy in the 21st century is the unprecedented pressure from migration, and the fact that certain groups can decide to permanently change the entire demographic make-up of a country without public debate and without public consent, by simply refraining from upholding its borders. It has been called “the greatest demographic experiment ever forced onto a people politically.”

In the UK, before Labour came to power, the number of people leaving Britain roughly balanced the number arriving. Then Tony Blair’s government “embarked on a policy that will totally change the nature of many of the communities in which we live without consulting any of us.” “Labour has never formally announced that it is committed to increasing immigration indefinitely. There was nothing about increasing immigration in Labour’s manifesto of 1997, or of 2001, or of 2005.” Still, although Mr Blair’s government has presided over a virtual explosion of immigration, Blair had the gall to accuse the rivalling Tories of exploiting the issue. He attacked the way the Tories had linked immigration with racism in campaign posters. “It is an attempt deliberately to exploit people’s fears, to suggest that for reasons of political correctness, those in power don’t dare deal with the issue,” he said.

Even in the USA, the most astonishing aspect of the immigration debate is that the élites “think they can override the clear and huge resistance of the American people.” As columnist Tony Blankley wrote, the Senate was prepared to “legislate into the teeth of the will of the American public.” Eight out of ten Americans wanted the borders closed to millions of illegal immigrants, yet nothing substantial has been done. There has to be a reason for this.

There is also in the USA a dangerous drive for granting full rights, even voting rights, to illegal immigrants. In the Nordic countries — Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Finland and Denmark — foreign citizens, though not illegals, are allowed to vote in local elections. As Roger Scruton points out, Western civilization depends on an idea of citizenship that is not global at all, but rooted in territorial jurisdiction and national loyalty. A nation that refuses to differentiate between citizens and non-citizens cannot survive.

It is more than a little ironic that people calling for restrictions of immigration are denounced as “anti-democratic forces” when it is the other way around. The most fundamental democratic right of all must be to decide who should be allowed to move into your home. Freedom of speech and immigration control should not be outsourced to faceless bureaucrats in Brussels or the UN. The people should decide who should be allowed to settle in their country.

UN bureaucrats from Islamic countries are influencing how we should manage our immigration policies, even our freedom of speech. This comes on top of the maze of non-governmental organizations and self-appointed human rights groups at home and abroad, always interfering in anything we do to maintain our own borders. Put together, this means that Westerners are no longer allowed to decide who should settle in their countries. This is decided by national bureaucrats in collaboration with Leftist open-border activists and the transnational, Multicultural industry.

Muslim immigrants want to first infiltrate established political parties, to ensure VIP treatment of Muslims and to keep the floodgates open to new Muslims arriving, and later to establish parties of their own. So far, this strategy has shown some success. They have also been rather successful at spreading terror in the West and instilling “fear into the hearts of the enemies of Allah,” just as the Koran commands. As Ibn Warraq, Ali Sina and other former Muslims have warned against, there is more evidence of an Islamization of democracy in the West than of any spread of democracy in the Islamic world.

I have warned against the development of a pragmatic alliance between Western Leftists and Muslims. Third World immigrants in general, and Muslims in particular, vote overwhelmingly for Leftist parties. This means that by simply opening the gates for massive immigration, Socialists can be certain of a net gain in future elections. This is a critical flaw in our societies, one that could destroy the entire democratic system unless fixed.

It cannot be dismissed as Leftist parties being merely “naive.” After a narrow election victory, Italian Socialists in 2006 almost immediately embarked upon expanding immigration and granting citizenship to tens of thousands of Muslims already in the country. At this point, there had been bombings in Spain and the UK, serious Muslim riots in France, murders of Islam critics in Holland and international mayhem caused by a few cartoons in Denmark. Italian Socialists knew fully well that similar problems were bound to result from Muslim immigration to Italy, yet they still went ahead with it. This is treason, pure and simple. Treason disguised as tolerance.

Is democracy compatible with Multiculturalism? Former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt thinks Multiculturalism can only work under authoritarian regimes, naming Singapore as an example. A people must have some shared bonds and a shared outlook on life. Multiculturalism will pit various groups against each other, creating a pattern of democratic Balkanization once the minority groups become large enough.

Indeed, there is a possibility of such a tribalization of democracy even without Multiculturalism, with women pitted against men, and young people against old people in ageing countries with strains on the working population. Maybe the only long-term solution to this is to reduce the size of the state and limit the reach of state interference. The bigger the size and power of the state, the more friction will be caused by competing for the spoils, and vice versa. The state should primarily be limited to protecting individuals from each other, taking care of national defence and upholding law and order.

We need to return to the principle of negative rights enshrined in the US Constitution - the freedom from tyranny and oppression - and away from the principle of positive rights - the “right” to a job provided by the state, for instance. The latter creates a lethal mentality of entitlement.

In the excellent magazine City Journal, Heather MacDonald examines some of the dilemmas posed by illegal immigration, first of all the lack of respect for the law. “Illegal-alien demonstrators put forward a novel theory of entitlement: because we are here, we have a right to be here. Protesters in Santa Ana, California, shouted: “We are here and we’re not going anywhere,” reports the Los Angeles Times.” She balks at the widespread contempt for American law contained in such defiant assertions. “Today’s international élites seek to dissolve “discriminatory” distinctions between citizens and non-citizens and to discredit border laws aiming to control the flow of migrants.” “Immigration liberalizers wield the threat of mass deportations as the only alternative to amnesty. The attrition strategy—relying on illegal aliens to leave voluntarily as their access to American benefits diminishes—would work just as effectively, without coercion.”

MacDonald also points out that illegal immigration has prompted a powerful grassroots democratic reaction, and thinks that the solution to this problem is to “prefer local decision makers over remote élites.” Indeed, this is the very foundation of democracy.

Thomas Sowell has hailed the legacy of thinker Eric Hoffer, and notes that “Hoffer’s strongest words were against the intellectuals.” “Eric Hoffer never bought the claims of intellectuals to be for the common man. “A ruling intelligentsia,” he said, “whether in Europe, Asia or Africa, treats the masses as raw material to be experimented on, processed and wasted at will.” “Implicit in much that they say and do is “the assumption that education readies a person for the task of reforming and reshaping humanity -- that is equips him to act as an engineer of souls and manufacturer of desirable human attributes.” “Hoffer called it ‘soul raping’ -- an apt term for what goes on in too many schools today, where half-educated teachers treat the classroom as a place for them to shape children’s attitudes and beliefs in a politically correct direction.”

F.A. Hayek described in the 1940s the practical problems with top-down planning:

There need be little difficulty in planning the economic life of a family, comparatively little in a small community. But as the scale increases, the amount of agreement on the order of ends decreases and the necessity to rely on force and compulsion grows. In a small community common views on the relative importance of the main tasks, agreed standards of value, will exist on a great many subjects. Bu their number will become less and less the wider we throw the net: and as there is less community of views, the necessity to rely on force and coercion increases… To imagine that the economic life of a vast area comprising many different people can be directed or planned by democratic procedure betrays a complete lack of awareness of the problems such planning would raise. Planning on an international scale, even more than is true on a national scale, cannot be anything but a naked rule of force, an imposition by a small group on all the rest of that sort of standard and employment which the planners think suitable for the rest.

He also stated that we shall not build civilization on the large scale, and that “on the whole there was more beauty and decency to be found in the life of the small peoples, and that among the large ones there was more happiness and content in proportion as they had avoided the deadly blight of centralisation. Least of all shall we preserve democracy or foster its growth if all the power and most of the decisions rest with an organisation far too big for the common man to survey or comprehend. Nowhere has democracy ever worked well without a great measure of local self-government, providing a school of political training for the people at large as much as for their future leaders. It is only where responsibility can be learnt and practised in affairs with which most people are familiar, where it is awareness of one’s neighbour rather than some theoretical knowledge of the needs of other people which guides action, that the ordinary man can take a real part in public affairs because they concern the world he knows. Where the scope of the political measures become so large that the necessary knowledge is almost exclusively possessed by the bureaucracy, the creative impulses of the private person must flag.”

What should we label such undemocratic, top-down planning? The Rule of Experts, or the Tyranny of Experts? Or what about the Rise of Transnational Anti-Democrats and Stealth Fascism? I have warned against “Stealth Socialism,” Marxism masquerading as something else. Perhaps we should also look out for “Stealth Fascism,” the authoritarian rule of a small group of individuals, hailing the glories of an invented past as the path to a powerful future. All possible only if we give up our freedoms in favor of their enlightened rule, of course.

The idea behind this Rule of Experts is that the world is too complex for “common people” to understand, and that enlightened despots or, in their own eyes, educated experts, should run things. There are several catches to this theory. First of all is the contempt for ordinary citizens we find among many self-appointed intellectuals and “experts.” This impulse is, in fact, probably one of the most important challenges to the democratic system. The irony is that these “élite” groups honestly think that anybody opposed to their policies are “anti-democratic forces” and warn against their “populism,” what others call the will of the people.

I know from personal experience that the ones championing Multiculturalism and mass-immigration have been élite groups and those sections of the general public with University education. Those without significant higher education, however, have been consistently skeptical of this project. And they were right. The logic behind “hate speech” laws is that the educated people should hold the uneducated “mob” and their destructive stupidity in check. But what if some of the most destructive stupidity resides in the most highly educated groups? Who are going to keep them from getting out of control, if they cannot be criticized or stopped?

Those spending years at abstract studies can sometimes become too removed from the harsh realities of everyday life to understand their more down-to-earth compatriots and appreciate their problems. What’s more dangerous is that they may not even care. Unfortunately, some “educated” persons like to come up with elaborate schemes for restructuring the entire society, and tend to view ordinary people as little more than ants, guinea pigs to be used and abused on the road to Utopia.

Another problem with the Rule of Experts idea is practical. Hayek warned already 60 years ago against the dangers of planning on an international basis. Yes, the world is a big, complex and fast-changing place, now during globalization more than ever. However, this is, in fact, a powerful argument against leaving experts to run our affairs. The changes are simply too complex for any one individual to comprehend. Modern men suffer from information overload, we simply have access to so much information that we cannot process everything and decide what’s important and what’s not. The downside to planning is the Law of Unforeseen Consequences. Society cannot function if run by an unrepresentative élite far removed from the issues at hand.

The European Union as it is today is probably one of the most powerful arguments against international planning there has ever been. The system is set up so that the élites shouldn’t have to be bothered with anything as prosaic as, say, the will of the people. However, does it also expose some flaws in the democratic system?

How could a few, selected people decide in back rooms to launch a huge project of the transformation of an entire continent, without being stopped or even have this Project acknowledged in public? Is democracy just a sham, an act where the general public is allowed to make minor decisions while powerful people move behind the scenes to make the most important decisions? Or is it the very set-up of such massive, transnational organizations such as the EU that moves power away from the people and into back rooms and the corridors of power? Is the creation of Eurabia an indication of democracy’s flaws, or an argument in favor of revitalizing it?

What happened to the ideal of investigative journalism, being of the side of the people and exposing abuse of power? There are people in the media who are criticizing the EU. Ironically, many of them are Socialists who think there is “too much capitalism” in the inner market. Leftists will, however, never criticize the worst aspects of it, the promotion of Multiculturalism, Muslim immigration and demonization of Israel and the United States, since these things fit their own, ideological agenda. European media are brimming with anti-Israeli and anti-American articles, yet hardly any of the mainstream journalists are writing about Eurabia or even mentioning the term. What happened to the free press? Was it merely an illusion, or did it get lost somewhere?

In Scandinavia at least, it is a well-documented fact, not a conspiracy theory, that journalists on average are much more left-leaning, politically, than the general populace. Fjordman has claimed that this may, in fact, have determined the outcome of the general elections in Norway in 2005, a very tight race eventually won by a narrow margin by the Leftist coalition. The fact that Leftist parties also got more than 80% of the votes of Muslims in the country may have contributed, too. Norway’s media coverage of the national elections revealed a desire for a ‘red-green’ government, said Professor Frank Aarebrot. “Most newspapers are what I would call politically correct. Much of the tone in the major Norwegian media is there.” Nearly 70 percent of journalists vote Labor (Ap), Socialist Left (SV) or Red Electoral Alliance (RV) according to a poll, and this is reflected in the press, Aarebrot said.

We thus have a situation where the media represents one of the major obstacles for the democratic system to work, instead of being one of its safety valves.

To sum it up, here are some suggested preconditions for a functioning, democratic system:

1.

There has to be a demos, a people with the sense of being a people with shared interests. Multiculturalism and massive immigration without assimilation could severely damage this demos.

2.

There has to be a genuine debate about the issues that matter. This is now severely curtailed in many Western countries for a combination of reasons. Leftist activists are promoting formal and informal censorship of critical issues, and the media isn’t functioning as a counterweight to the political élites because, in many cases, the journalists are a part of these élites and share their political goals.

3.

There has to be a mental connection between those implementing policies and the people they are supposed to serve. And the general public must have a genuine possibility of removing those officials who are not following the popular will. With the growth of supranational institutions, there are now many people in the élite groups who feel little connection with the people or the nation states they are technically supposed to serve. Their people are just stepping stones to their international careers. They are anyway both physically and mentally so removed from ordinary people that they may not understand their concerns even if they cared about them, which they frequently don’t.

4.

No major presence of Muslims. Islam is toxic to a democratic society, for several reasons. One is the fear of physical attacks against anybody criticizing the Islamic agenda, thus destroying any possibility of a free, public discourse. Another is the resentment caused by Muslims asking for separate laws and “special treatment,” as well as the violence and harassment of non-Muslims which is always part and parcel of Jihad.

5.

The country must be able to control its own borders, and immigration must follow popular will. A nation that does not discriminate between citizens and non-citizens is destined to die.

The scary thing is, when I look at this list, in Western Europe in particular hardly any of these necessary preconditions for a democracy are currently present. We are no longer citizens, we have become subjects, without genuine influence over the future of our countries and mere spectators to destinies others have chosen for us. We are citizens if we have genuine influence over what our tax money is spent on. We are subjects if we just pay taxes and somebody else decides what to do with this money, without consulting us on major issues.

What to do about this situation? Some possible remedies have been suggested by Anthony Browne: “Free speech could be protected with an equivalent of the first amendment in the US Constitution. The state should not try to censor or criminalise any speech unless it is a direct incitement to violence.” “The oligarchy of political correctors can be curbed by the introduction of direct democracy, such as the citizen’s initiatives so popular in the US. Within any legislative area, a binding referendum should be called on any proposal if supported by a certain percentage of the population, so long as the proposal doesn’t infringe the basic liberties of individuals, and is fiscally neutral (otherwise people always support tax-cutting measures).”

“Such citizen’s initiatives directly return power to the people, protecting them from being steam-rollered by an élite in hock to political correctness, for example on issues such as the right to defend yourself against intruders in the home, or curbing mass immigration.” “Citizens’ initiatives are likely to prove very popular and create a far more motivated, less passive and less easily patronised citizenry. Once practiced for a few years, it would be very difficult for a future politically correct government to unravel it, for fear of voter retribution.”

Browne is right: Political Correctness and ideological censorship need to be confronted head-on by getting rid of hate speech laws.

We need to re-establish national control with our borders and genuine, democratic control over immigration. If we have to withdraw from some of the international agreements favored by transnational progressivism, so be it. The situation as it is today simply isn’t sustainable. For Europeans in particular, it means scrapping the entire European Union in its present form, which is specifically designed to take power away from the people. Maybe it can be replaced by a free trade zone, but this must not include goals of completely abandoning national border controls.

Above all, we need to completely stop, and preferably reverse, Muslim immigration, as a significant Islamic presence is toxic to any democratic society.

It is difficult to see what to do about the media, except for simply refusing to buy and fund the most “politically correct” ones. People know they need to protect themselves against diseases. Maybe we need to protect ourselves against mental diseases, too.

We need a slogan: “Political Correctness is mental AIDS. Wear an intellectual condom. Use the blogosphere.”